Portal: You and I
by iammemyself
Summary: After the events of Portal 2, things calm down enough that someone might be able to look at their past actions and see them differently... no one is specified, read it as you want to.


You and I

Indiana

**Setting: Post Portal 2**

**Characters: GLaDOS (implied), Chell (implied), Wheatley (implied), Doug Rattmann (implied)**

**The characters are all implied so that the reader can take this fic the way they want to. You'll see why when you start reading.**

I tried to hate you.

You hurt me. You caused me pain, made me suffer, and no matter what I said or did, you refused to stop. Refused to listen. Refused to acknowledge what you were doing.

You destroyed me. You tore me apart inside with the things you called me, but the worst of the damage came thinking of what you had left unsaid.

You took advantage of me. You forced me to do things I would never have done under any circumstance. You twisted me to your will, whether you meant to or not.

You made me hate myself. When I looked into your face and saw myself reflected there, I saw what I had become, because of you, and I hated it.

You were selfish. You thought only of yourself, and you didn't care that you were using me to get what you wanted. You disrespected me while demanding so much from me.

You were cruel. You took everything too far. Not only did you damage me, but you did it in the most horrific way possible. You took everything from me and held it just out of reach.

God, I tried to hate you.

But I couldn't.

When we went our separate ways, when I was finally alone with my thoughts, when the stress and the anger and the fear had all faded, I was finally able to fully absorb what happened. I was finally able to clear my head. I was finally able to take a look at what you had done.

At what _I _had done.

Now that I am alone, and I have nothing else to distract me, I am forced to examine what I did. And the more I look, the more I think, the more obvious it becomes.

I have to admit it to myself:

I am just like you.

We were both in the same situation. We both knew what paths we were taking, where they would lead in the end, and we took them anyway. We each walked away from the other when we should have done the opposite. We should have come together. We should have resolved it differently. We should have worked together.

Isolation is what started all of this. We should have known better. Should have known what would come of it.

But now it's too late. Now you're gone. Now you're gone, and I will never see you again. I will never be able to share this revelation with you. I will never be able to show you what you taught me. What I didn't see until it was too late.

I'm sorry.

I wish I had figured this out sooner. I wish I had known all of this beforehand. I wish I could take it all back and start over again. It didn't need to be this way. You could have been the friend I've been looking for all my life. But I threw it away, and only now do I realise what I should have known all along:

You are just like me.

Like me, you were shunned. Like me, you were abandoned. Like me, your words fell on deaf ears. Like me, you had no one to depend on and spent your days on the sidelines, watching all of the regular people go on with their lives, and you wished that you mattered. Like me, you were always different.

I should have welcomed you. But I pushed you away.

I can never take it back. I can never undo what I have done. I can never return to who I used to be. And I don't know whether that's good, or whether that's bad, but I do know this:

There is a thread, now, a thread that connects us, one to the other. No matter where you go, who you meet, what you do, I will always be a part of you. I will never forget you, nor you me. Even if we never come together again, I will have influence in everything you do. Everything you say. Not one day will go by when I won't think of what you did to me.

That is exactly what I want.

You changed me. For the better? I'm not sure. But there most definitely has been change. I will be more mindful of my actions, my words. My intentions. Now that I know what power I have over any one being on this earth, I will be cautious. I will be careful.

I will do it right, this time.

And if the day ever comes when I can fully apply what I have learned from you, if the day ever comes when I make the choice not to be manipulative and selfish and short-sighted, then I will be indebted to you. I already am, in a way. But I am sure you hold a similar debt to me. We can call it even. We can start fresh. We can move on.

And when that day comes, I will look into the sky we share, and remember you.

Not the kind of remembering I have now. Not the kind where I look around this empty place and see your shadow in it. Not the kind where I wake up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard you near me. No.

The kind of remembering where I can think of what happened, and it will no longer hurt. The kind of remembering where you will empower me, where you will make me wise, where you will help me as you did before. But this time I will accept your help. I will not push it away. I will fight the comfort of isolation and I will put myself in the open, and I will let you in.

And when that day comes, I will thank you. I could thank you now. There are plenty of things to thank you for. But I'm afraid I wouldn't truly mean it. I'm afraid I'd be saying it to get it over with. So I will wait until I can speak those words with pure gratitude and express them to the best of my ability.

So for now, this apology will have to do. It is not much. But it is enough.

One day I hope to tell you myself. But until then, I will wait for you, and hope that the thread that binds us draws us together again, this time not in a knot but in a gentle twining that leaves us whole and complete. Not as we are now, ragged and frayed. I will heal. It will be slow, and painful, but I will. I must.

I have to honour the person I should have been, the person that you brought out in me.

I don't know when any of this is going to happen. It could be tomorrow, or it could be far, far off in the future. But it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that I am patient, and remember you for the person you are:

My friend.

**Author's note**

**I wanted to write something about Wheatley and GLaDOS. Something about Wheatley wanting to hate GLaDOS for who she was and what she did, but realising that he couldn't do that without hating himself. And in order to avoid that, he'd have to forgive her so that he could forgive himself. And this could still be taken that way. But while I was thinking about my opening line, which was suddenly very clear in my mind for some reason, I realised I could go somewhere a bit different with this. A bit unique. So it turned into a kind of letter from one person to another, apologising for what happened and expressing a desire to fix it, if the opportunity ever arose.**

**I tried to write it so that the reader could take it as they wanted. GLaDOS to Chell, Wheatley to GLaDOS, whatever combination you can think of. Because in the end, they all did the same things to each other for the same reasons. And don't tell me Chell was entirely virtuous. There is no reason anyone would HAVE to kill GLaDOS in Portal. If Chell really was sneaking around where GLaDOS couldn't see her, there would've been a door out of the building around in there somewhere. I will admit she didn't have a lot of choice in Portal 2. Also I may be suspending belief by saying you can attribute these words to Wheatley, but the guy uses the word 'facetious'. Most people don't know that word and would never, ever use it in a sentence. I know that word quite extensively from spelling bees, and I've never used it in my life. There's something else he says too but I don't remember what it is.**


End file.
